Wow!

Hello Families!

How are you?  I am enjoying this week, the kids have so many ideas and they are getting so great and expressing them in different ways.  They are such a creative bunch of people.

Some things we are thinking about are how our bodies are getting more capable as we get bigger, our farm field trip, the fact that Earth Day is coming,  thermometers and the number 4.

Here are some images from a tumbling moment we took this week.  Can you believe how flexible and coordinated we can be?

As Earth Day comes, friends have already brought this up on their own and shared how important this day is to many of them.  This has gotten the rest interested.  We are planning to create an Earth Party on Wednesday April 20th. So far they know they want to pick up trash in our neighborhood.  To jump start our party brainstorm we talked a bit today about what Earth day is for.  Here are some of their answers:

It's for cleaning up because the earth can't clean up people's messes.

It's for taking care of where we live.

It's for helping our world.

We have this day to make the earth greener and to make nature more beautiful.

We take care of our earth because you don't want plants to get sick.

The metaphor of "the earth is our mother" was brought up and the kids tried to explain this. 

Here is one explanation as to why we say "Mother Earth":

They call the earth mother because it's really pretty and the earth takes care of everyone." 

(Makes a nice correlation with their image of mothers, too, eh?)

Today Paz  brought in a thermometer and we did some simple experiments.  (You can click on the images above to make them bigger)  We read the temperature inside (65) then we put it outside our classroom while we were at lunch (87) then we checked it again inside after not much time (67).  But how does this work?  The kids had some theories and began discussing possibilities.  This turned into a list of questions:

How do thermometers work?

What is the red line made of?

Is there paper in there?

What kinds of chemicals are in there?

Is there ink in there?  Blood?
Could it go all the way down or up?

What makes it go up and down?

Will the thermometer work if you put it in water?

Does the thermometer change color in water?

What happens if a thermometer is in a bowl of ice?

If you put it in cold water and it's hot outside will the thermometer work?

How could we check what the temperature is in the middle of the night?

The kids want some time to draw their own theories and collect their personal explanations before we do more research and find the answers. So please don't tell us the answers!  We wrote on the calendar that next Tuesday we will do some Internet research and watch a video that could show us how thermometers are made.  My favorite part of all this is that they have so many fabulous questions and that one of their suggestions after listing so many was to ask someone who has made a thermometer.  Go to the source, right?  It's so nice to hear that they already know how to find more information that they need!

Please watch out our class room for the number 4 equations.  The kids are finishing up their creative ways to show how this quantity can work together with other numbers.  Here are a few:

I hope you are having a lovely week.  Thank you for sharing your creative kids with us at Innovations!
 Love, Jennifer